“What is good for the community is good for business.” – Douglas Dayton

I’ve gotten to talk with some interesting people but Doug Dayton was one of my favorites. In part because he built two of my retail favorites; Target and Southdale. He was also good to work with while putting together information used to make this video for the MN Real Estate Hall of Fame. Sad to hear this news of his passing this weekend.

Via Bring Me The News: The Strib’s Neal St. Anthony notes that Douglas Dayton was the youngest of five Dayton brothers who took over their father’s department store in the 1940s and built it into publicly held Dayton Hudson Corp, one of the nation’s largest regional department store chains.

This video, made for UST’s Shenehon Center Real Estate Hall of Fame, has a nice history of the Dayton brothers, as told by Douglas Dayton:

The retail real estate market both locally and nationally has been influenced by the role of the Dayton brothers. Their family legacy of retail real estate began in 1902 when George Draper Dayton developed a six-story building on Nicollet Mall to house R.S. Goodfellow and Company later known as The Dayton Company. In 1950, the Dayton brothers – Donald, Bruce, Wallace, Kenneth and Douglas – inherited the company. Under their leadership, the world’s first fully enclosed shopping mall, Southdale Center in Edina, was built. Southdale was developed to be a place to bring people together and provide a sense of community.

In addition to their expansive list of contributions to the real estate industry, the Dayton brothers were very mindful of using their influence to do the right thing. Following the corporate belief that “what is good for the community is good for business,” the Dayton brothers have continued a legacy of giving back to the community through an assortment of philanthropic efforts.